Home > Authors Index > Ellen Glasgow > Miller Of Old Church > This page
The Miller Of Old Church, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
||
Book 1 - Chapter 19. Treats Of Contradictions |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ BOOK I CHAPTER XIX. TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS As Molly passed down the Haunt's Walk, it seemed to her, also, that the spring had suddenly blossomed. A moment before she had not known that the path she trod was changing to emerald, that the meadows were spangled with wild-flowers, that the old oaks on the lawn were blushing in rose and silver. For weeks these miracles had happened around her, and she had not noticed. As oblivious to them as old Adam Doolittle was, she had remembered only that her birthday came on the seventeenth of April, when, except for some luckless mishap, the promise of the spring was assured. A red-winged blackbird darted like a flame across the path in front of her, and following it into the open, she found Kesiah gathering wild azalea on the edge of the thicket. At the girl's approach, the elder woman rose from her stooping posture, and came forward, wearing a frown, which, after the first minute, Molly saw was directed at the sunlight, not at herself. Kesiah's long, sallow face under the hard little curls of her false front, had never appeared more grotesque than it did in the midst of the delicate spring landscape. Every fragile blossom, every young leaf, every blade of grass, flung an insult at her as she stood there frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudescence of soul--of that longing for happiness which is a part of the resurrection of the spring, and which may survive not only the knowledge of its own fruitlessness, but a belief in the existence of the very happiness for which it longs. All the unlived romance in her heart had come to life with the young green around her. Middle-age had not deadened, it had merely dulled her. For the pang of desire is not, after all, the divine prerogative of youth, nor has it even a conscious relation to the possibility of fulfilment. Her soul looked out of her eyes while she gazed over the azalea in her hand--yet, in spite of the songs of the poets, the soul in her eyes did not make them beautiful. "I came down with Jonathan, Molly," she said. "You will doubtless find him at the brook." For an instant she hesitated in confusion and then added hurriedly, "We were speaking about you." "Were you?" asked Molly a little awkwardly, for Kesiah always embarrassed her. "We were both saying how much we admired your devotion to your grandfather. One rarely finds such attachment in the young to the old." "I have always loved him better than anybody except mother." "I am sure you have, and it speaks very well for both of you. We are all much interested in you, Molly." "It's kind of you to think about me," answered Molly, and her voice was constrained as it had been when she spoke in the library at Jordan's Journey. "We feel a great concern for your future," said Kesiah. "Whatever we can do to help you, we shall do very gladly. I always felt a peculiar pity and sympathy for your mother." Her voice choked, for it was, perhaps, as spontaneous an expression of her emotions as she had ever permitted herself. "Thank you, ma'am," replied Molly simply, and the title of respect to which Reuben had trained her dropped unconsciously from her lips. She honestly liked Kesiah, though, in common with the rest of her little world, she had fallen into the habit of regarding her as a person whom it was hardly worth one's while to consider. Mrs. Gay had so completely effaced her sister that the rough edges of Kesiah's character were hardly visible beneath the little lady's enveloping charm. "It is natural that you should have felt bitterly toward your father," began the older woman again in a trembling voice, "but I hope you realize that the thought of his wrong to you and your mother saddened his last hours." To her surprise Molly received the remark almost passionately. "How could that give me back my mother's ruined life?" she demanded. "I know, dear, but the fact remains that he was your father---" "Oh, I don't care in the least about the fact," retorted Molly, with her pretty rustic attempt at a shrug, which implied, in this case, that the government of nature, like that of society, rested solely on the consent of the governed. What was clear to Kesiah was that this rebellion against the injustice of the universe, as well as against the expiation of Mr. Jonathan, was the outcome of a strong, though undisciplined, moral passion within her. In her way, Molly was as stern a moralist as Sarah Revercomb, but she derived her convictions from no academic system of ethics. Kesiah had heard of her as a coquette; now she realized that beneath the coqueteries there was a will of iron. "You must come to us, some day, dear, and let us do what we can to make you happy," she said. "It would be a pity for all that money to go to the conversion of the Chinese, who are doubtless quite happy as they are." "I wonder why he chose the Chinese?" replied the girl. "They seem so far away, and there's poor little Mrs. Meadows at Piping Tree who is starving for bread." "He was always like that--and so is my sister Angela--the thing that wasn't in sight was the thing he agonized over." She did not confess that she had detected a similar weakness in herself, and that, seen the world over, it is the indubitable mark of the sentimentalist. Analysis of Mr. Jonathan's character, however, failed to interest his daughter. She smiled sweetly, but indifferently, and made a movement to pass on into the meadow. Then, looking into Kesiah's face, she said in a warmer voice: "If ever you want my help about your store room, Miss Kesiah, just send for me. When you're ready to change the brine on your pickles, I'll come down and do it." "Thank you, Molly," answered the other; "you're a nice light hand for such things." In some almost imperceptible manner she felt that the girl had rebuffed her. The conversation had been pleasant enough, yet Kesiah had meant to show in it that she considered Molly's position changed since the evening before; and it was this very suggestion that the girl had tossed lightly aside--tossed without rudeness or malice, but with a firmness, a finality, which appeared to settle the question forever. The acknowledged daughter of Mr. Jonathan Gay was determined that she should continue to be known merely as the granddaughter of his overseer. Kesiah's overtures, had been--well, not exactly repulsed, but certainly ignored; her advice had melted to thin air as soon as it was spoken. As Molly flitted from her over the young weeds in the meadow, the older woman stood looking after her with a heaviness, like the weight of unshed tears, in her eyes. Not the girl's future, but her own, appeared to her barren of interest, robbed even of hope. The spirit that combats, she saw, had never been hers--nor had the courage that prevails. For this reason fate had been hard to her--because she had never yielded to pressure--because she had stepped by habit rather than choice into the vacant place. She was a good woman--her heart assured her of this--she had done her duty no matter what it cost her--and she had possessed, moreover, a fund of common sense which had aided her not a little in doing it. It was this common sense that told her now that facts were, after all, more important than dreams--that the putting up of pickles was a more useful work in the world than the regretting of possibilities--that the sordid realities were not less closely woven into the structure of existence than were the romantic illusions. She told herself these things, yet in spite of her words she saw her future stretching away, like her past, amid a multitude of small duties for which she had neither inclination nor talent. One thing after another, all just alike, day after day, month after month, year after year. Nothing ahead of her, and, looking back, nothing behind her that she would care to stop and remember. "That's life," she said softly to herself and went on her way, while Molly, glancing back, beheld her only as a blot on the sunshine. "Poor Miss Kesiah," the girl thought before she forgot her. "I wonder if she's ever really lived?" Then the wonder fled from her mind, for, as a shadow fell over her path, she looked up, startled, into the eyes of Gay, who had burst suddenly out of the willows. His face was flushed and he appeared a trifle annoyed. As he stopped before her, he cut sharply at the weeds with a small whip he carried. "Don't, please," she said; "I hate to see people cut off the heads of innocent things." "It is rather beastly," her returned, his face clearing. "Did you come out to find me, cousin?" "Why should I, Mr. Jonathan?" "You don't soften the blow--but why 'Mr. Jonathan'?" "I thought it was your name." "It's not my name to you--I say, Molly, do you mind my telling you that you're a brick?" "Oh, no, not if you feel like it." "I do feel like it tremendously." "Then I don't mind in the least," and to prove it she smiled radiantly into his face. Her smile was the one really beautiful thing about Molly, but as far as her immediate purpose went it served her as successfully as a host. "By George, I like your devotion to the old chap!" he exclaimed. "I hope a girl will stick by me as squarely when I am beginning to totter." "Have you ever been as good to one?" she asked quite seriously, and wondered why he laughed. "Well, I doubt if I ever have, but I'd like very much to begin." "You're not a grandfather, Mr. Jonathan." "No, I'm not a grandfather--but, when I come to think of it, I'm a cousin." She accepted this with composure. "Are you?" she inquired indifferently after a minute. While she spoke he asked himself if she were really dull, or if she had already learned to fence with her exrustic weapons? Her face was brimming with expression, but, as he reminded himself, one never could tell. "I haven't any cousin but you, Molly. Don't you think you can agree to take me?" She shook her head, and he saw, or imagined he saw, the shadow of her indignant surprise darken her features. "I've never thought of you as my cousin," she answered. "But I am, Molly." "I don't think of you so," she retorted. Again, as in the case of Kesiah's advances, she was refusing to constitute a law by her acknowledgment. "Don't you think if you tried very hard you might begin to?" "Why should I try?" "Well, suppose we say just because I want you to." "That wouldn't help me. I can't feel that it would make any difference." "What I want, you mean?" "Yes, what you want." "Aren't you a shade more tolerant of my existence than you were at first?" "I suppose so, but I've never thought about it--any more than I've thought of this ten thousand a year. It's all outside of my life, but grandfather's in it." "Don't you ever feel that you'd like to get outside of it yourself? The world's a big place." For the first time she appeared attentive to his words. "I've often wondered what it was like--especially the cities--New York, Paris, London. Paris is the best, isn't it?" "Yes, Paris is the best to me. Have you ever thought that you'd like to wear pretty gowns and drive through a green park in the spring--filled with other carriages in which are wonderful women?" "But I'd feel so miserable and countrified," she answered. "Are they any happier than I am--those wonderful women?" "Perhaps not so happy--there's a green-eyed dragon gnawing at the hearts of most of them, and you, my nut-brown beauty, have never felt his fangs." "I'd like to see them," she said after a minute, and moved slowly onward. "Some day you may. Look here, Molly," he burst out impulsively, "I'm not going to be sentimental about you. I haven't the least idea of making love to you--I've had enough of that sort of rot, God knows--but I do like you tremendously, and I want to stand to you as a big brother. I never had a sister, you know," he added. Something earnest and tender in his voice touched her generosity, which overflowed so easily. "And I never had a brother," she rejoined. "Then, that's where I'll come in, little cousin," he answered gently, and drawing her to him, kissed her cheek with a caress which surprised him by its unlikeness to the ordinary manifestations of love. His hand was still on her shoulder, when he felt her start back from his grasp, and, turning quickly in the direction of her glance, he saw the miller looking at them from the thicket on the opposite side of the brook. The anger in Abel's face had distorted his handsome features until they appeared swollen as if from drink, and for a single instant Gay imagined that it was indeed whisky and not passion that had wrought so brutal a change in him. "So you've made a fool of me, too, Molly?" he said when he had swung over the stream and stood facing her. "You're all wrong, Revercomb," began Gay, and stopped the next instant, because Molly's hand had shot out to silence him. "Will you be quiet?" she flung at him impatiently; and then fixing her eyes on Abel, she waited silently for him to finish his speech. That her lover's fiery temper had aroused her own, Gay realized as soon as he turned to her. Her face was pale, but her eyes blazed and never had he felt so strongly the tie of blood that united them as he did while she stood there waiting for Abel's accusations with a gesture which appeared to fling them back in disdain. "I might have known 'twas all fool's play with you--I might have known you had flirted too much to settle down to an honest love," said Abel, breathing hard between his word as if each one were torn from him with a physical wrench at his heart. In losing his self-possession he had lost his judgment as well, and, grasping something of his love from the sincerity of his emotion, Gay made another ineffectual effort to present the situation in a fairer light. "If you would only listen, my good fellow--if you would only let me explain things---" he began. "Will you be quiet?" said Molly a second time, and then facing him passionately she threw him a gesture of dismissal. "If you want to please me, you will go." "And leave you alone with him?" She laughed. "Do you think I'm afraid of an angry man, or that I've never seen one before?" With that he obeyed her, turning from time to time on his way over the meadow to make sure that she did not need his support. In spite of the utter unreasonableness of the affair, in some unaccountable way his sympathies were on the side of the miller. The fellow was a boor, of course, but, by Jove! he was a magnificent boor. It had been long since Gay had seen such an outburst of primitive feeling--long since he had come so close to the good red earth on which we walk and of which we are made. "You're out of your head, Abel," said Molly--Gay turned away from them--and the tone in which she spoke was hardly calculated to bring him back to the place he had deserted. "You will say things you'll regret, but I'll never forgive." "I'm sick of your eternal forgiveness," he retorted. "I've been forgiven every time you got into a temper, and I suppose I'll be forgiven next every time you are kissed." The "rousing" which had threatened every Revercomb was upon him at last. "Well, as a matter of fact it is time enough for you to forgive me when I ask you to," she returned. "You needn't ask. It's too much this time, and I'll be damned before I will do it." Bending over a grey skeleton of last year's golden-rod, she caressed it gently, without breaking its ghostly bloom. Years afterward, when she had forgotten every word he uttered, she could still see that dried spray of golden-rod growing against the April sky--she could still hear a bluebird that sang three short notes and stopped in the willows. In the quiet air their anger seemed to rush together as she had sometimes thought their love had rushed to a meeting. "You have neither the right to forgive me nor to judge me," she said. "Do you think I care what a man imagines of me who believes a thing against me as easily as you do. If you went on your knees to me now I should never explain--and if I chose to kiss every man in the county," she concluded in an outburst of passion, "you have nothing to do with it!" "Explain? How can a girl explain a man's kissing her, except by saying she let him do it?" "I did let him do it," she gasped. For an instant they gazed at each other in an anger more violent in its manifestation than their love had been. An observer, noticing them for the first time, would have concluded that they had hated each other for years, not that they had been lovers only a few minutes before. Nature, having wearied of her play, was destroying her playthings. "I would marry no man on earth who wouldn't believe me in spite of that--and everything else," she said. "Do you expect a man to believe you in spite of his eyes?" "Eyes, ears--everything! Do you think I'd have turned on you like that before I had heard you?" A sob, not of pity, but of rage, burst from her lips, and the sound sobered him more completely than her accusations had done. Her temper he could withstand, but that little childish sob, bitten back almost before it escaped, brought him again on his knees to her. "I can't understand--oh, Molly, don't you see I am in torment?" he cried. But the veil of softness was gone now, and the cruelty that is bound up in some inexplicable way in all violent emotion--even in the emotion of love--showed itself on the surface. "Then stay there, for you've made it for yourself," she answered, and turned away from him. As his voice called her again, she broke into a run, flying before him over the green meadow until she reached the lawn of Jordan's Journey, and his pursuit ended. Then, hurrying through the orchard and up the flagged walk, she ascended the steps, and bent over Reuben in his chair. "Grandfather, I am back. Are you asleep?" The robin that had flown from the railing at her approach swung on the bough of an apple-tree and regarded her with attention. "Grandfather," she said again, touching him, "oh, grandfather, wake up!" _ |
||